On organizing music in iTunes, sort fields and ID3 tags

[aklamo]

I just got a cubic ton of Django in all his forms (with Jean Sablon, The QHCF, solo, with Coleman Hawkins, with Freddy Taylor, etc., etc.)

I also had a lot of complete this and complete that (The Classic Early Recordings box set, the complete QHCF), and now I have to cull, compare, contrast and reorganize. iTunes should help me do all that.

By the time I'm done, I'll likely have only the Complete complete works of Django, organized with just one copy of every recording, and perhaps with playlists representing the box sets I'll be getting rid of.

Here's the issue, though: I want all of these songs to live under Django Reinhardt as the artist on my iPod and in itunes, but also be sortable and searchable by the other artists, and I want to show when Coleman Hawkins or Benny Carter sat in with Django, or when Django sat in with Duke Ellington (and so on). This might be impossible, but I'm going to use iTunes' latest additions of sorting fields and see what I can come up with for a solution.

Has anybody run into any solutions for this kind of thing? Any help or hints would be appreciated.

[lipi]

i don't claim this is ideal, but:

i use the "album artist" field for the big or common name: "duke ellington" or "django reinhardt", for example. i use the "artist" field for the exact credit: "duke ellington and his famous orchestra" or "alix combelle et son quintette de jazz hot", or whatever.

i use the comment field to list all the artists at the recording session (or, if i can figure it out from the liner notes, those that played on that particular take).

i haven't started using the sorting fields yet. i wish there were multiple comment fields -- i would like to put recording session details somewhere in there, too, and perhaps do some dj-specific classification, too. i've thought of just using the lyrics field for that.

[fredo]

Isn't there a "grouping" field in iTunes?

I dont keep any consistency with it, but that's the field where I would drop musician names that I want to make note of for each track.

[aklamo]

all great ideas. thanks for your feedback.

I was playing around with the comments field per Keither's suggestion (elsewhere) and noted that you can make smart playlists based on the contents of the comments field, and that the search function does take comments into consideration.

Now as to the effect all of this has on my ipod, i still don't know, but I'll find out soon enough.

I'm definitely going to look into the 'grouping' abilities (whatever they may be). that's one of those things I always just glazed over.

[lipi]

oh, right. the grouping field, i believe, refers to the grouping of tracks. "group" doesn't refer to the musicians here. (of course, you can use it for that, though i suspect it has a fairly small character limit.)

i use grouping for things like album titles in a box set, or names of classical compositions that span multiple tracks yet do not take up an entire album.

[Lawrence]

The inability to edit and manage the tags in ITunes is one of its major drawbacks and why I do NOT use it for organizing or searching for music. (I use it mostly to just manage my Ipod). The song "ratings" in ITunes also do not edit the MP3 tags, but instead just edits the ITunes database entry for that song, so the ratings are not transferable to other programs. Many people have lamented the long hours lost categorizing/rating music in ITunes, only to lose those ratings when the ITunes database crashed or when they moved to a different media program.

ITunes also did something completely shocking to my MP3 collection: it re-organized the folders so as to remove tracks from the "Various Artists" folders (mostly compilations) and moved them to new folders it created for the individual artists. It did so without my knowing it or asking if doing so was o.k. I am still trying to figure out how to un-do that, because I want the music saved in groups of the fifty or so albums from which they came, not reorganized by artist into hundreds of little folders containing nothing more than one or two songs each. (Reorganizing by artist is something you can do INSIDE the music management program.)

Does anyone know how to un-do that in ITunes?

[lipi]

what is it with your computer rants, lawrence? did the poor guy that started this thread say "please, tell me how itunes sucks and give me no actual alternatives"? were you bitten by a laptop in your youth?

ITunes also did something completely shocking to my MP3 collection: it re-organized the folders so as to remove tracks from the "Various Artists" folders (mostly compilations) and moved them to new folders it created for the individual artists. It did so without my knowing it or asking if doing so was o.k.

oh, it asked--when you installed and first ran it. you just didn't pay attention to what it was asking you. it popped up a dialogue that said "keep your itunes music folder organised?", and you said "o.k."

I am still trying to figure out how to un-do that, because I want the music saved in groups of the fifty or so albums from which they came, not reorganized by artist into hundreds of little folders containing nothing more than one or two songs each. (Reorganizing by artist is something you can do INSIDE the music management program.)

reorganising by album is also something you can do inside the music management program. it's not really an argument for or against the way it keeps its library organised.

Does anyone know how to un-do that in ITunes?

you can't. you can turn off the option for future tracks, but that's about it:
preferences -> advanced -> general -> keep itunes music folder organised

you can move everything back with a little perl script, if you're so inclined. use the mp3::tag module (http://search.cpan.org/~ilyaz/MP3-Tag-0.9709/Tag.pm) to read the tags and get the album information, then move the files to new folders named after the album tag. this is the way to go on os x. i gather from comments you and reuben exchanged that you use some sort of joke operating system from redmond, though, so maybe you're not so much into perl. soooo...you can use something like mp3tag to move the files around (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/).

note that after you move everything, itunes will have lost the location of each file, and it won't be able to play them until you re-import them. (just make sure "keep itunes music folder organised" is not selected, or it will move them all around again.)

edit: oops! i lied. i forgot you can mark an album as a compilation. this may do just what you want:
1) make sure "keep itunes music folder organised" is selected, or this won't work
2) select all the tracks from an album that got "messed up", and mark compilation "yes".

the tracks will be placed in a folder with album title inside another folder named "Compilations". perhaps not exactly the way you had them, but close enough, i think, and certainly trivial to move from there, if you so desire.

[fredo]

what is it with your computer rants, lawrence?

haha, if only they were limited to just computer rants.


btw, thanks for the mp3tag link and suggestion.

the grouping field, i believe, refers to the grouping of tracks. "group" doesn't refer to the musicians here. (of course, you can use it for that, though i suspect it has a fairly small character limit.)

haha, oh well. I had no idea what it was for, so I just started listing musicians in there from time to time. You're probably right about the character limit-- i really only use it for small group combos or individual musicians and vocalists not listed in the artist field.

[JesseMiner]

I think Lawrence is probably not alone with some of these confusions.

The inability to edit and manage the tags in ITunes is one of its major drawbacks

This is very confusing because iTunes does not make it clear which pieces of information that you enter are written to the file directly are which are only written to the iTunes database. This can lead to some major disappointment when songs are removed from iTunes and the data is lost.

Is there a good website that clearly spells out what is, and is not, written directly to the file as opposed to the iTunes database? This website is helpful regarding the current id3v2.0 standards, but it doesn't help at all regarding the various software (such as iTunes) implementations out there.

ITunes also did something completely shocking to my MP3 collection: it re-organized the folders so as to remove tracks from the "Various Artists" folders (mostly compilations) and moved them to new folders it created for the individual artists.

Does anyone know how to un-do that in ITunes?

This is definitely a feature that you accidentally said "yes" to (it's the default option and easy to miss) when you first installed iTunes. Unfortunately it can't be undone via iTunes. Your best bet is to use another program such as MediaMonkey that has the great feature of allowing you to reorganize both your file structure and naming convention for your files based on their mp3 tags. Of course once you do this reorganization, you will need to remove and then import your entire library back into iTunes.

I hope that helps.

Jesse

[CafeSavoy]

Is there a good website that clearly spells out what is, and is not, written directly to the file as opposed to the iTunes database?

More things might be written, but i only depend on the file name, major field names (name, artist, album, etc), and comment field to be portable. That's why i encode some of the information into the name field and the rest into the comment field.

[Lawrence]

Thanks for the advice Jesse and Lipi!! I'll try Lipi's edited suggestion in ITunes first and let you know if I need to move on to the Media Monkey option.

And, Lipi, the rant just stemmed from the thread-relevant advice about organizing music in ITunes: namely, don't do it because when your change programs, you will lose many of your tags that went into the ITunes database, not the MP3 file, itself. I do like ITunes for what it is, but it is a love/hate relationship primarily because of these two (and at least two other) problems.

[Haydn]

Here's the issue, though: I want all of these songs to live under Django Reinhardt as the artist on my iPod and in itunes, but also be sortable and searchable by the other artists, and I want to show when Coleman Hawkins or Benny Carter sat in with Django, or when Django sat in with Duke Ellington (and so on). This might be impossible, but I'm going to use iTunes' latest additions of sorting fields and see what I can come up with for a solution.
Has anybody run into any solutions for this kind of thing? Any help or hints would be appreciated.

You can do this by using the 'Grouping' and/or 'Comments' fields, and then creating Smart Playlists to show songs matching your requirements. (It's probably simplest to do this in the Comments field, although the Grouping field will remember previously entered text, making it quicker to add this information to lots of tracks).

For example, if you stored your sidemen in the Comments field, you could create a Smart Playlist called 'Django with Coleman':

Artist contains Django PLUS
Comment contains Coleman

Which would give you all Django songs featuring Coleman

[JesseMiner]

i only depend on the file name, major field names (name, artist, album, etc), and comment field to be portable. That's why i encode some of the information into the name field and the rest into the comment field.

Same here. Just to be safe, I only utilize the name, artist, album, genre, comments and bpm tags currently for my DJing purposes (these are all standard tags that I have found to be used by all the major pieces of software that I use). I also include all of the above peices of information, except for genre and comments, in my file naming convention, so I can easily rebuilt the tags if they ever get accidentally deleted (ex: "Duke Ellington - Blues In Orbit - C Jam Blues - 156.mp3").

Jesse

[Mr Awesomer]

Does anyone know how to un-do that in ITunes?

Just use Windows Explorer to reorganize your files. In the process you could even do some cleanup.

Then make sure you have iTunes properly setup to not "organize" as described by others.

Re-import your new organized Music folder into iTunes.

This is how I operate in both XP and OSX, cause I don't like the way Apple programs "organize" things. While it may be great for most people, it conflicts with how I prefer to process information.

Same goes for their other "i" programs. Much like I have a "Music" folder, I have a "Photos" folder that I keep organized they way I like it to be and turned off the "auto-organize" controls of iPhoto before I started importing.

[aklamo]

So I went through my collection of Django and set the Artist to the actual name of the group with whom Django was playing for that cut (Le Quintette du Hot Club de France, Django Reinhardt & l'orchestre Hubert Fol, Django Reinhardt et ses rythmes, etc.) and set the Sort Artist as Django.

This solution looks beautiful in iTunes. When I do a search for Django, only one artist shows up in the browser, and if I look at the individual tracks, it shows me the actual group.

Not so much on the iPod. It's a cluster-f*ck of duplicated artists (not duplicated tracks, just duplicated artists, each one showing the same contents). Sure, everything is sorted alphabetically under D for Django Reinhardt, but it's a mess. I just want to be able to browse my ipod artist listing, Show Django Reinhardt, and have all the groups he played with show up.

I might be asking for too much. My music organization OCD is taking over...